


whose beauty is past change

by pipistrelle



Series: by the wind of her wings [2]
Category: Charmed (TV 1998)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Daemons, Episode Related, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-07-29 06:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16258553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: You can't be a witch for long without learning that what happens to the body and the mind also affects the soul.Five times the Charmed Ones' daemons were altered by magic.





	whose beauty is past change

**Author's Note:**

> A retelling of certain episodes, with the addition of daemons. It probably won't make much sense unless you've watched those episodes recently, but might be fun anyway. I definitely had fun writing it. (As with everything I write, this turned out to be mostly about how much I love Prue.)
> 
> When not magically altered, daemons are as follows:
> 
> Prue: Verity, Vera for short. A female hen harrier hawk, but with the blue-gray feathers of a male.  
> Piper: Percival, Percy for short. A male coturnix quail. Very fluffy.  
> Phoebe: Oberon, a male fruit bat. Technically an Egyptian fruit bat. Picture the cutest bat you can imagine.  
> Leo: Estelle, a female wolfhound, pure white since his death.  
> Andy: Fiona, a female Irish setter.  
> Grams: Gabriel, a male Stellar's Sea Eagle.
> 
> Transformed daemon shapes will be clarified in the end notes.

  **I.** **The Woogyman**

"I do not have a dark side, thank you very much," Phoebe says, half laughing. She turns aside to put down the mail, revealing her fluffy fruit bat daemon hanging upside-down with his feet hooked into the back of her pink sweater. Prue tries to hide a smile, and Piper giggles at the sight of him, eyes bulging out and nose twitching. Oberon's ears are quivering, as though he's laughing, too.

A few hours later, when Phoebe comes up from the basement to rescue Piper from the gasman, she's alone. In the chaos of fending off the gasman and the police, Piper doesn’t think anything of it. Even when Prue gets home, it doesn't strike either of them as strange -- they've been witches for months now, they're finally getting used to seeing each other without their daemons. And Phoebe seems cranky, but it's not any worse than she's been before, back in the good old days before magic. 

\---

After avoiding the basement for eighteen years, Phoebe goes down the stairs alone for the second time in as many hours and stops once her shoes touch concrete. She turns left and there, dangling from the rafters, is the shape of her childhood nightmares.

 _Y_ _ou must use your new power on your sisters_ , it says.

Its eyes are black pits, totally lightless, only visible at all because of the glassy sheen that sets them apart from the thick black fur on its face. Always before in her dreams it's been amorphous, an ill-defined cloud of toxic smoke, but this is infinitely worse. "Please don't make me do this," she begs.

Her soul stares back at her with vicious contempt, lips curling back from its fangs. _You are not strong enough to fight me._

Oberon wouldn't lie to her. He never has before.

\---

Phoebe doesn’t need to hear the doorbell ring — everything’s going perfectly according to plan, down to the minute — but she _can_ hear it. She can hear everything; the sizzle and snap of appliances short-circuiting in the kitchen, the painful groaning of the ancient water heater, the chatter of the guests on the porch, even the anxious pounding of Prue’s heart. Her new soul can hear it all, and he tells her everything she needs to know. He’s telling her now that her moment has arrived.

She pauses at the top of the basement stairs, surveying the disaster in the kitchen; Prue in a bathrobe and Piper singed and covered in flour. The doorbell rings again. “Is anyone going to answer that?”

Prue and Piper just stare. Phoebe shrugs and starts for the living room, but Prue grabs her arm. “Are you crazy?” she hisses. “You can’t go out there like that. You need a daemon, unless you want my boss and her famous metaphysician associate to know we’re witches —“

“Of course, how silly of me.” Phoebe twirls her hand in the air. A wisp of smoke forms around her fingers, then grows and pours itself into the shape of a sleek black cat that twines around her ankles. “There, that should do it, don’t you think? You’d better finish getting ready.”

She can hear everything they say behind her back, of course. “Did she just — make an illusion? Of _her daemon_? That’s — that’s obscene.” “ _Is_ it an illusion?” _“_ It has to be!” “But if it is, then where’s her actual —“

Phoebe flings open the front door and lounges against it, letting the red dress and black cat work their magic. “Welcome to Halliwell Manor,” she says to the man and two women standing on the front porch, clutching tawdry gifts and gaping at her. “My name is Phoebe. I’ll be your cruise director this evening.”

—--

Professor Whittlesey’s daemon is a corn snake, banded with the same light auburn shades as her hair. For the first part of the evening he’s draped around her neck, a fetching counterpoint to her smart blue suit. When she comes back from her tour of the basement, her daemon has retreated to her purse, with only the last few inches of his tail poking out. Nobody remarks that what used to be an orange-reddish band of scales is now pitch black. That’s not the kind of thing people notice.

Piper and Prue might have noticed, but they’re too preoccupied with the guests. Prue and Piper’s daemons might have noticed, but they’re too preoccupied trying to pretend that they’re still bound by a normal human’s range. When Prue and Piper go out onto the lawn, Vera and Percy go too. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, Phoebe is grateful for that. Neither her sisters or their daemons can be allowed in the house. If they’d stayed —

 _You’d have wrung their necks_ , Oberon says in her head. _You wouldn’t want to, but you would do it. Because I asked you to._

But they’re out, all of them. The humans leave in a cab, Professor Whittlesey with her daemon tucked away out of sight, already growing into something hooded and venomous. The witches turn back toward the house, to Phoebe standing in the doorway, alone. The black cat is gone.

 "Why are you doing this?” Prue demands, her restless daemon rising into the air.

“Because he asked me to.”

“Who asked you to?” Piper calls.

Phoebe doesn’t answer. She wants to, but she can’t bring herself to say his name.

“Okay, that’s enough.” Prue takes three purposeful steps toward the door. Vera turns sharply and dives for the foot of air above Phoebe’s head.

Before Prue even reaches the stairs, Vera crosses the threshold and is knocked out of the air by a flicker of lightning. Prue staggers and falls, clutching her chest. Piper rushes to her side, while Piper’s daemon darts toward the limp huddle of feathers lying singed by the front walk.

 _I can kill them from here._ The dark voice in Phoebe's head shows her wisps of shadow that turn into knives, crossbows, guns — heavy, lethal weapons, built for cruelty.

“No,” Phoebe says. “You can’t.”

_It would be easy. The house would be mine, and the power would be yours._

Prue is shouting, but Phoebe can barely make out the words. “You shouldn’t,” she tells the darkness.

_As long as they live here, they are a threat. They cannot be allowed to remain._

Prue and Piper are still staring at her. The urge to destroy them is strong, but something else is stronger. “You don’t live here anymore,” Phoebe tells them, just before she slams the door on them forever. “He does!” 

—--

They come running when she calls for help.

Of course they do. They always have; they always will. _You’re their weakness,_ Oberon tells her. He’s grown monstrous, large enough that his clawed feet envelop the thick beams holding up the basement ceiling and his pointed black ears touch the floor. _You were the weakness in the Power of Three, and now you will be their destruction_ _._

They come armed with only a flashlight and a scrap of memory. _Pathetic_ , Oberon sneers, but that small light is enough to show them the vast black leathery curtains of his wings, the eyes like embers, the squashed, wrinkled nose and wicked fangs. Piper gasps. “Oh my God, Prue. It’s _him_.”

Percy darts across the floor. Oberon snaps for him, snarling, but misses, and the little quail slips under Oberon’s head and whispers into the curved shell of his ear. Phoebe, at the top of the stairs, can’t hear what Percy says, but the surge of terror she feels from her daemon leaves her in no doubt as to what it could be. They want to kill him, vanquish him. Her new, powerful soul —she'll have to kill her sisters, he's going to make her —

Prue takes a step towards her through clinging tendrils of shadow. “Phoebe, you’ve got to listen to us. Remember Grams’ story, about the woogyman, and the light?”

“I can’t. Please don’t make me.”

“It’s no use,” Oberon thunders in a voice that shakes the foundations. “We’re evil now!”

His wings unfold, slow and monumental as night falling. Phoebe feels the blackness spread across her, infecting her whole life, past and future. She stumbles, fingers brushing Grams’ portrait as she steadies herself, and

_darkness billows up from the basement floor, enveloping Grams like a dark flower. “Go back to bed, sweetie,” she says. In front of her Gabriel seems to hang suspended in a painfully bright golden blaze of Dust and magic, saying_

 I am…Light.”

And she can see it. Golden light, drifting in a lazy swirl through the basement like motes in a sunbeam.

“I am one too strong to fight.”

Piper and Prue blaze like torches against a night sky; their daemons look like miniature suns.

“Return to dark, where shadows dwell. You cannot have this Halliwell!”

The thing that looks like Oberon is a lightless pit, a yawning void, sucking Dust and light and magic away into somewhere outside the world. Looking into it is like being blinded, but Prue shouts to her to say the spell again, and halfway through she sees something start to glimmer in the heart of the shadow.

“Go away and leave my sight — and take with you this endless night!”

With a howl of fury, Oberon starts to dissolve, bleeding off into smoke that drains away into the crack in the basement floor. Prue and Piper and their daemons pulse brighter and brighter, beating back the darkness. For an eternal second Phoebe feels the agony of her soul being ripped away, and she starts to scream — and then it’s over. All that’s left is a seam in the solid concrete and a small, fuzzy brown bat lying in a disheveled heap in the corner, shielded by two pairs of sheltering wings.

 

****II. The Wendigo** **

Piper wakes in a cold sweat with the hot, metallic taste of Andy's blood still in her mouth, just in time to hear the doorbell ring.

She stumbles to the door in a daze, her daemon cradled in the crook of her injured arm, and opens it a crack to try to convince Andy to leave before she rips his throat out; but a crack is all he needs. His daemon Fiona wedges her sleek red-furred head into the space, and Piper has to take a step back to avoid her inquisitive muzzle, which leaves room for Andy to push the door open the rest of the way. "I have to tell you about Billy, he's been killed."

Piper's stomach lurches even as her mouth waters at the remembered taste of a beating heart in its death throes. She feels Percy shuddering, and lifts her other hand to shield him, or maybe to shield Andy from him.

Agent Fallon steps up behind Andy, her oversized lizard daemon draped over her shoulders. She asks a few questions, then holds out a hand toward Percy, who huddles closer against Piper. "You don't mind if I --"

"Careful!" Andy snaps.

"My apologies. I just wanted to look at the arm, that's all. You're the only person to survive an attack by one of these creatures," Agent Fallon says to Piper. "It'd be a shame if you got infected by it."

"Oh," Piper says, "Right. Sure." She sets Percy down -- bending over makes her dizzy, and she has to grab the doorframe to keep from collapsing at Andy's feet -- and holds out her bandaged arm for Agent Fallon's inspection.

Agent Fallon looks it over and nods curtly. "Feel better," she says, already turning away.

Andy lingers a moment in the front hall, looking Piper over. Fiona sniffs at Percy, _whuffs_ low in her chest and nuzzles him like she would a roughhousing puppy. It makes Piper feel twelve years old again, back when Andy and Prue were attached at the hip and Andy was, for all intents and purposes, the big brother Piper and Phoebe had never had.

The warm glow of nostalgia breaks as Fiona yelps in surprise and alarm, jerking back from Percy like she's been burned. "I'm sorry," Piper hears her say, in a voice she hasn't heard since she was a teenager. "I didn't mean to hurt him --"

"What?" Piper looks down to see Percy huddled at her feet, eyes closed and head tucked protectively under one wing, surrounded by a handful of dusty brown feathers that have fallen out. "It's okay," she says, but it's too weird to talk to a daemon that doesn't belong to one of her sisters, so she looks up at Andy instead. "It's fine, you didn't -- I'm really not feeling well, it's probably just -- I think I should go lie down."

Andy's eyes are wide and uneasy. Daemons don't molt, or shed; the physical forms of adult daemons should be static, unless something is disastrously wrong. "Try and get some sleep," he says at last, touching his fingertips lightly to her temple, maybe to reassure himself about her temperature. "Want me to call your sisters?"

"I'll call them," she croaks, knowing without looking down that Percy is still losing feathers, that something is deeply, disastrously wrong. "Thanks. For coming by."

She shuts the door on him so fast, she barely misses catching Fiona's tail.

By the time Prue and Phoebe get home, the floor of the front hall and living room are littered with dusky brown feathers. Piper sits waiting for them, curled up in a chair with Percy in her lap, holding him because she can't think of anything else to do. He's getting bigger, almost twice his usual size, and the weight is making her legs go numb, but she doesn't dare put him down. The skin showing through in patches where he's molted is pebbly and sand-colored, and he hasn't opened his eyes or spoken to her since Andy left.

Prue and Phoebe burst through the front door in a whirlwind of panic. She can smell it, the acrid stink of their fear. "It's going to be okay," one of them says -- Phoebe, she thinks -- and she rips off the bandage and the blanket over her knees, shows them the coarse brown hair covering her wound and her ragged, half-dead daemon. Phoebe freaks out, Prue takes charge, and before she can stop herself Piper is snarling at them both to _shut up_ , and then Percy lifts his head from under his wing and she sees that his beak is gone, and instead he's snarling too, with a misshapen lizard maw full of murderous teeth.

It's hard to keep track of what happens after that. She's aware of Phoebe taking her up to the attic, Oberon flying ahead to be as far away from Percy as he can, and she's aware of Prue grabbing her by the shoulders and saying "This isn't you. It's the blood of the wendigo, and you've got to fight it."

 _I can't fight it, it's gotten into my soul_ , she wants to say, but instead she says "It's so strong."

"You're stronger," Prue replies.

Percy is crouched by Piper's feet, something neither lizard nor bird, but a grotesque, prehistoric melding of both. He's almost bigger than Vera now, but Vera lands beside him anyway and spreads a wing over him protectively, like she always does, while Prue goes back to the _Book of Shadows_. Percy's new mouth is only inches from Vera's throat, and Piper can hear the beating of Vera's powerful heart, can already feel the crunch of brittle bird bones in Percy's teeth. She thinks she might be sick. Unaware of the danger, Phoebe comes over and wraps an arm around her, while Prue talks about melting Agent Fallon's heart of ice.

Piper shudders. "What if you can't find her? You'll have to kill me."

Vera, still leaning against Percy, starts to preen one of the only patches of feathers left, at the base of his neck. "No one's going to kill you," she says softly.

Oberon, dangling from one of the rafters, adds, "Yeah. We're going to kill the thing that did this to you."

"But," Prue says, "we might have to…confine you until we get back."

Percy swipes hard at Vera with one of his powerful new foreclaws, knocking her away like she weighs nothing. Prue gasps and doubles over, clinging to the lectern to keep her feet. "No! Go to Hell," Piper snarls.

Vera flaps until she gets back to her feet and waddles back to cuddle up to Percy again, while Phoebe goes to get chains. Piper can feel Percy trembling, perfectly poised between fight and flight. Prue rests against the _Book of Shadows_ until she gets her breath back, then follows her daemon, coming to stand in front of Piper. Doesn't she realize that she should be running _away_?

"Hey," she says softly, searching Piper's eyes. "Are you back?"

The bloodlust withdraws all at once, like a tide, leaving Piper cold and weak. "I don't want this to happen to me, Prue."

"Kill Ashley," Percy says. "This is us talking."

That's the last clear thought Piper remembers. She's dimly aware of cold metal around her wrists, of Vera nipping at Percy's legs to force him into a cage that used to belong to Rasputin, Grams' dog. It's barely big enough to hold him, and the pressure of the bars against the vestiges of his wings, the sense of _confinement_ , is maddening enough to make her want to gnaw her hands off to get out of the handcuffs, to rend and tear and devour --

\--and she wakes up naked and freezing in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night, with Prue and Phoebe staring at her, and Andy lying unconscious a few yards away.

She can feel Percy right behind her. She whirls around, takes one look at the mule-sized, saw-toothed dinosaur standing where her daemon should be, and darts for cover. It still _feels_ like Percy, though, and she glances back to see the monster beginning to deflate like a carnivorous balloon. By the time she reaches the nearest tree, what's left of the dinosaur collapses and condenses in a swirl of golden Dust, and Percy is squawking after her, an ordinary quail again.

Phoebe is hard on Percy's heels. She throws her jacket and then her arms around Piper, while Prue goes to check on Andy.

"This is a much better look on you," Phoebe says happily, as Oberon drops out of the tree and wraps himself as far around Percy as he can.

"Thanks," Piper mutters. "I think so, too."

  

 **III. Bride** ****of Zile** **

Prudence and Verity wake. They have no memory of falling asleep. They have very little memory of anything much, but there is a command in the front of their mind: _Eliminate the Charmed Ones_ , clear as the tone of the crystal bell that hangs in the depths of the Abyss by the throne of Pandemonium.

They are commanded, and they will obey. But they take a moment to inspect each other first, woman and daemon. “We’re —“

 “—beautiful,” Verity says.

Prue is dressed in sheer darkness, her skin like ivory and bone, accented by lipstick and eyeliner made from the juice of berries whose slightest taste could kill a whitelighter. Verity is twice the size she used to be, with a beak and eyes of beaten silver, and plumage that looks black at first glance only because the shades of indigo and lightless blue are too varied and splendid for the mortal eye to comprehend. Prudence lifts her daemon to her accustomed perch on her shoulder. Verity spreads her wings, and they look like a queen worthy to be worshipped by every fallen angel in Hell.

The other Charmed Ones are pale, pathetic imitations. She can feel that she’s tied to them somehow, but it’s almost insulting. Verity could bite either of their daemons in half. Maybe she will.

Prue throws her former sisters effortlessly against the wall. Their daemons scatter. Verity lunges into the air, diving for Phoebe’s black vampire bat. She manages to get one clawed foot around him, but he sinks his fangs into her leg and forces her to let go.

“Maybe we should get her a divorce,” Piper snarls, advancing on Zile. Her daemon used to be a quail, Prue remembers. He’s something else now, something blacker and heavier, like an overgrown crow. With a screech he throws himself at Zile, to claw his eyes out, but Zile smirks and cloaks himself in a glamour to look like Prue, and Piper’s daemon swerves aside at the last second.

Good. They want Prue alive, and they’re not quite evil enough to attack with their daemons — not yet, at least.

Prue and Zile, still in his glamour, blink and reappear. Verity sweeps the length of the courtyard and settles on Prue’s shoulder — the wrong Prue.

The real Prue shudders as her daemon’s talons come in contact with someone else’s skin. The sensation is alien and obscurely horrible: first the tingling numbness of shock, then the queasy awareness of a cold, clammy, slimy _otherness_ spreading through the deepest, inviolate center of her being. Zile knows what he’s doing to her. He smirks, running a hand through Verity’s soft chest feathers like Prue herself so often does. He knows that Prue’s pain, horror, revulsion, they all belong to him now, just as everything she is belongs to him. Her lord and master.

And he knows she’ll do equally horrifying things to him once they’re finally alone. Marriage is an equal partnership, after all.

“I love you,” Prue says to her mirror self and her daemon. They’re beautiful in the low torchlight.

Then Piper turns Zile to ice, catching half of Verity’s leg in the blast. Prue has time to feel the searing cold, then Zile shatters, the seductive chains of his enchantment wither from around her heart, and the darkness drains from Vera like the stopper's been pulled from a pool of ink, leaving her ruffled and wide-eyed and blue-gray again.

Later, back at the manor, Prue remembers the rush of evil, the dark, heady beauty of power. Evil can’t be manufactured from nothing, it has to grow from a carefully nurtured seed that’s already there; so does love. There was no seed of love in her for Zile, that was all a tawdry imitation created by Dantalion’s magic. But if even a hint of that love had been real, if the towering black flame of her power and passion had been met by an answering spark, like the one Phoebe felt from Cole —

“I definitely do not like the fact that you lied to us about vanquishing him,” she tells Phoebe. “But I have to admit, after taking a trip down the dark side, I sort of understand it a little better.”

 

****IV. Fury** **

The funniest thing is that everyone seems to think this anger is something the Fury did to her. Piper knows that it's been growing inside her for weeks, like a cancer, feeding off of her and yet also part of her, poisoning her and trying to take her over with its power. All the Fury's breath did was bring it closer to the surface. She feels amazing, better than she has since --

She doesn't think about that anymore. She doesn't have to. There's evil everywhere, she can smell it in the air, like roasted meat and honey, sickly-sweet and begging for the cleansing touch of fire. She doesn't need to scry for it anymore, it comes to her, begging to be destroyed. Vengeance just drops into her lap.

"Vengeance on them all," Percy hisses in her ear. "On the whole damn _world_!"

Her fingers are twisted into savage talons, the better to tear sinful flesh from corrupt bone. Percy has talons now, too. When Piper reappears in a dark alley after fleeing the manor, Percy lands on her shoulder, and he doesn't bother being gentle -- all the gentleness is burned out of him, out of both of them. His talons dig into the soft place above her collarbone, drawing blood.

She can see him out of the corner of her eye. Yesterday he was a fat little fuzzball, incapable of threatening anything bigger than a mouse. Today he's sleek, regal, with a head and tail as red as fire, eyes like copper coins.

The hawk's silhouette on the edge of her vision is suddenly too familiar to bear, and a treacherous part of her whispers _Is this what_ she _saw every day, before --_

Percy bites her hard on the ear and the thought, the pain, goes up in smoke. Their new sisters are waiting for them.

\---

 "To un-demon her, we have to close the portal of unexpressed fury," Phoebe said. "There's something she's not saying."

Which is all fine to talk about, but then Piper and the warped red-tailed hawk that used to be Percy poof in and try to eviscerate Cole. "Piper, Cole is not your problem and you know it!" Phoebe cries. "You think I abandoned you. You think it's my fault Prue died. You blame me. Just admit it --"

Piper backhands Phoebe through a wall. Then she turns her snarling, unkempt bloodlust and her shrieking daemon on Paige.

Her _daemon_ \--

"You don't want to kill me, you don't even know me! And it's not about Phoebe, is it? Guys, _look_ \-- who she's really angry at --" Piper's claws are closing around Paige's throat. "Look at her daemon!"

Because Paige never met Prue, but she spent the whole funeral staring at the near life-size portrait on a stand by the coffin, of a pretty dark-haired woman in an immaculate suit, smiling like she knows more than she'd ever say, one hand ruffling the feathers of the hawk on her shoulder.

\--

There's a bronze medallion hung on each of the plaques in the masoleum, with the engraved form and name of the deceased's daemon. Piper's Fury claws aren't strong enough to break the plaque itself, or even tear it from the wall, but she rips the medallion away and sinks to the floor, clutching it and sobbing. All the rage and hatred and desire for vengeance pours out of her, into the metal, until it glows red-hot and melts between her fingers. At some point she becomes aware of Leo beside her, frantically trying to heal the burns on her hands.

He can't heal the rest of it. Nothing can.

(Not even Percy, fluffy and harmless again, fluttering over to press himself against her heart. But at least he understands.)

 

**V.**

The Saturday lunch rush at Quake. A family with three kids is having a screaming food fight at Table 5, a circuit's blown in one of the freezers and the entire Catch of the Day is spoiled, there's a health inspector tapping his foot down at the other end of the bar and Piper's cell phone is ringing. She knows if she answers it Paige is going to tell her there's a demonic emergency. It's that kind of day.

"Yes, I know, I'll handle it," she says to the waitress frantic about a customer demanding a refund for last week's alleged food poisoning. Her back has been killing her for the last two hours, her feet are throbbing and her head feels like it's about to split. Mark's threatened to fire her already today, and she's had just enough time between putting out fires to think about what will happen if she loses this job -- they'll lose the house, probably one of the cars, the spiritual nexus will fall and who knows what _that'll_ do to the fate of the world --

Percy's running around close by, darting under tables and around the bar, holding hurried conferences and issuing orders to the daemons of waiters, busboys, and a stray sous-chef. He's somewhere out of sight when she feels it.

A wave of stillness floods her from the heart out. Aches, pains, and worries fall silent like they've been frozen, but she's positive she didn't freeze anything. In the wake of the calm comes a bone-deep warmth, like sunlight, in her chest first and then spreading up into her shoulders, down her arms. Someone jostles her from behind and the tray of glasses she's holding drops from her nerveless fingers.

"Hi, honey."

Piper whirls around.

Prue is standing next to the bar, looking exactly the same as the day she died. She's holding Percy in her arms, close to her heart. "I'm sorry I couldn't come to you before. This is kind of a…special occasion."

"Oh, my God." It all comes rushing back, tearing through her like lightning. It's been years since she worked at Quake. "This is a dream."

"Yes."

Piper tries to say something, anything, but then Prue's arm is around her and she's hugging her big sister again, with her heart and soul pressed between them. "Oh, my God," she says into Prue's shoulder, feeling the tears start and not caring. "Oh my God, Prue, there's so much, I -- Phoebe went with Cole, she was evil, I lost her. I failed you, failed both of you -- and Mom, and Paige --"

"And you brought her home safe. I know. I came to tell you that I'm so proud of you, Piper."

That gets a watery laugh. "Proud of me? For what?"

For a second Piper's world is filled with the low, approaching beat of broad wings. It's a sound she hasn't heard in a year. A sharp but gentle grip closes around her shoulder and she feels the warm weight of Prue's soul settling. "You've given the forces of evil all kinds of hell," Vera says softly in Piper's ear. "You stopped every one of the terrible dangers that's tried to destroy our family."

"Not the Source," Piper whispers. "Not in time to save you."

"That wasn't fair, and it wasn't your fault," Prue says, and Piper almost laughs again at the familiar tone in her voice. Somewhere, some angelic powers have been getting a very strongly-worded earful for the last year. "But you're stronger than you realize -- you always have been. You're strong enough to face anything they can throw at you."

"Who? Good or evil?"

"Both," Prue says firmly. "And I want you to know that even if they never let us come and visit you again, I'm always with you, and _always_ proud of you."

Vera preens a stray strand of Piper's hair. "And we'll be with you again someday, for good. A long, long time from now."

"Promise?" Piper croaks.

Prue pulls back a little, just far enough to brush her lips against Piper's forehead. "I promise."

She's dissolving, like she's orbing, but the orbs are yellow, not blue. Piper turns her head just enough to catch a glimpse of Vera on her shoulder. The silhouette is the same one she remembers, but the feathers are a bright, blazing, burnished gold.

**Author's Note:**

> Transformed daemons, in case it wasn't clear:
> 
> Oberon under the influence of the woogyman: A gigantic black vampire bat.  
> Percy under the influence of the wendigo: A small Utahraptor.  
> Vera turned evil: A black eagle (actually its own species!).  
> Percy while he was a Fury: A red-tailed hawk.
> 
> There were more instances of transformation and possession in the show, but these are the ones I thought were most interesting daemon-wise. With the last part included because the effect Season 4 had on Piper made me tired just watching it. 
> 
> Let me know if anyone's reading this niche AU of a 20-year-old series, and don't be surprised if fic starts turning up for the remake fairly soon. You're all lovely. <3


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